Yeah .. it is wild. I think part of it is they tied sooo much of their identity and feeling of value to trump that admitting they were / are wrong would be invalidating themselves and their artificially constructed value but it is unbelievably dogmatic.

It is almost like the value many ( not all ) christians see in christianity isn't the ethics but instead the ease at which they can mark the trait of non-christian and classify it as unclean , evil, and less than. Not that the Bible is the 'best' ethical document to begin with but my hot take is that most people look for systems that let them feel better about themselves for the least amount of effort.

It is almost like we had something for this exact thing that was soooo very good that we forgot how bad something was ... it is almost like that.

Stay safe people.

Frats are so very strange. Its like they looked at trauma and were like ... "we can use this". Then they created a toxic relationship that none of them can leave.

I am sure there are many exceptions to this but I am just speaking from my limited experience.

Probably a direct line between toxic masculinity and hazing in frats. Not that non-male groups can't have these issues but this particular flavor of cyclical trauma...

I certainly agree that more options will help - but, I would love to see a more federate / user powered, owned option take YouTube's place not just Youtube #2. it feels like a centralized option will just corrupt over time no matter the intentions and we will just be repeating the same mistakes but perhaps the economics of Video hosting / streaming at scale require something like this .. I am not sure how the economics of something like peer tube scale but I would love to see us all learn from our mistake and not just make it again. But ... maybe I am just idealistic and not grounded in reality.

Please no more 'winning'... please.

Joking aside , some of my extended family still thinks the US is winning and that a lot of these 'pain points' are required to Larger-winning. I am not certain how to unpack the cope but the cope is strong.

I suspect things are going to get even wilder ( hard to believe that is possible ) as the US lead up to the mid terms. The writing seems to be on the wall for Trump and Co. which is going to scary and dangerous for a lot of people. Honestly wont be surprised if he tries to use ICE to implement some sort of facsimile of martial law to prevent the county / finalization of the Vote. I don't think they will wait for post midterms to try and prevent / change the outcome. Buckle in people , stay safe.

Yeah , I love a good ad blocker / sponsor block / privacy frontend but they all feel like duck tape on a sinking boat. At some point we have to move away from these centralized platforms but the enshitification hasn't outweighed the lion's share of content / creators on these platforms to a tipping point for the majority. Ad blocks let you mitigate the enshitification so you can stay on these platforms longer - in many cases this is required so not knocking it, I do it as well. My hope is that as these companies continue to go after ad blocks users will finally jump ship in mass as they are forced to confront the lovecraftian nightmare that is any of these platforms without an ad block.

Glad to hear it. But fines like this are just a cost of business for them and for every big company. A fine only hurts if it turns the profit negative. It has to bite enough that breaking the law costs more than not getting caught. Or someone goes to jail. They made more than $942 million by gambling with kids' safety. The leaders likely read the ruling and did the math and would make the same decisions again and just try harder to get away with it. Getting caught harming children ( not just children ) at scale should result in a company no longer existing. It doesn't.

yeah , what? So their concern is that drinking water is being 'contaminated' by a number of drugs including abortion drugs. I am not sure how that would be happening but yeah better than trying to track people down via waste water. Strange.

yeah , I don't think things look great across the board but I really struggle to see any light for the younger generations that are either in the education system or just coming out of it. With no real incentive to educate out side of a desire to just be educated I could see a strong dystopian future where those generations have less and less skills to critically judge information ... but also clearly the older generations can't critically judge information as well - which is how we got here. But , perhaps things will look dystopian enought that it will trigger change.

This guy ... crushing it.